Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

My favorite chocolate bar

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In lieu of a lengthy and probably not all that interesting description of what has turned out to be one of the worst days I’ve ever had trying to write at a cafe (“Srsly? You two are going to yell a conversation at one another when you’re two feet apart…and one of you is wearing headphones?”), I’m going to give you this picture of my current favorite snacking chocolate (bet you can’t just stop at one ounce per day!) and think relaxing thoughts that don’t involve any of the very noisy and very obnoxious people who have been sitting near Nina and me at this table.

Chocolate

This is some tasty chocolate

Nina and I have probably been no picnic either.

Music of choice: Once More With Feeling, from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”

Chronicle: the review

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Our movie choice this week was Chronicle or The Woman In Black. We picked Chronicle.

A teenaged boy, alienated at home and at school, decides he’s going to film everything in his life from now on (hence the conceit of this movie). He ends up recording how he and two friends find a weird glowing object in the woods and the effects that come about as a result: they start developing telekinetic powers and a weird sense of what’s going on with the other two in this clique. Their powers seem to grow the more they use them. And if they can stick to the rules and not hurt other people or let anybody else know what’s going on, they’ll be fine.

You can probably guess what happens next.

Chronicle is a pretty simple movie. This summary covers everything in the movie. There is nothing extraneous: why is the main character alienated at home? You’re going to find out two or three times. How do the kids practice with their powers? You’re going to see three or four different examples of how they learn to do new things and increase their powers.

Darin wanted to see Chronicle because one of the teenagers is played by Michael B. Jordan, whom he really liked in Friday Night Lights. He’s pretty good. The other two are pretty good too, although they don’t show great range. They don’t have to: this movie isn’t a character study. It’s mostly a good depiction of how you can make an effective little B-movie with an unknown cast and probably a small budget. I didn’t feel as though I’d wasted my time or money watching Chronicle. I wasn’t watching high art, either.

Lowest point: Something happens in the movie that had me turning to Darin and saying, “Seriously? They went with that cliché?” I know why they did it but…honestly, storytellers out there, if you find yourself going with this particular cliché (here goes, in rot-13: Gur oynpx thl qvrf svefg) REWRITE YOUR SCRIPT PLEASE. Because it bugs the hell out of me, every single time it happens, and it still happens what seems like every single time.

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Wow. According to a comment on Entertainment Weekly’s article about the special effects in Chronicle, the movie was made for 15 million dollars.

That is nothing less of stupendous.

That is less than craft services on most major budget pictures, and Chronicle was number one this week.

Just…wow.

Another reason to exercise

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In case you needed one, the New York Times neatly summarizes the results of a study published in Nature last month:

It’s long been known that cells accumulate flotsam from the wear and tear of everyday living. Broken or misshapen proteins, shreds of cellular membranes, invasive viruses or bacteria, and worn-out, broken-down cellular components, like aged mitochondria, the tiny organelles within cells that produce energy, form a kind of trash heap inside the cell.

In most instances, cells diligently sweep away this debris. They even recycle it for fuel. Through a process with the expressive name of autophagy, or “self-eating,” cells create specialized membranes that engulf junk in the cell’s cytoplasm and carry it to a part of the cell known as the lysosome, where the trash is broken apart and then burned by the cell for energy.

Without this efficient system, cells could become choked with trash and malfunction or die. In recent years, some scientists have begun to suspect that faulty autophagy mechanisms contribute to the development of a range of diseases, including diabetes, muscular dystrophy, Alzheimer’s and cancer. The slowing of autophagy as we reach middle age is also believed to play a role in aging.

Most metabolism researchers think that the process evolved in response to the stress of starvation; cells would round up and consume superfluous bits of themselves to keep the rest of the cell alive. In petri dishes, the rate of autophagy increases when cells are starved or otherwise placed under physiological stress.

Exercise, of course, is physiological stress. But until recently, few researchers had thought to ask whether exercise might somehow affect the amount of autophagy within cells and, if so, whether that mattered to the body as a whole.

After reading this (at 4am, as I was unable to get back to sleep), I had two thoughts:

  1. Yup, definitely gotta exercise more, and
  2. Those poor mice.

I would make a lousy biology researcher.